Compare the price between Jotelulu’s Remote Desktop service and Azure’s RDS and find out why Remote Desktop is up to three times less expensive than the same service from Microsoft.

These days, remote working has become an important part of life. The vast majority of companies have now accepted this new reality and are pushing ahead to adapt and digitalise. As a result of the pandemic, something that has aroused great interest are remote desktop services, which allows you to use your day-to-day applications (A3ERP, Office, Adobe Acrobat, Sage 50c, ExitERP, etc.) whilst being able to work from anywhere. Many businesses now see that these solutions offer them the option of working on a hybrid cloud/local environment without having to make any great changes to the way they work.

Two good options that could potentially cover all of an SME’s needs are:

• Remote Desktop from Jotelulu. 
• Microsoft Azure RDS (Remote Desktop Service).

But what about the price? Is there much of a difference between these two solutions?

Price: Remote Desktop vs Azure RDS

For small businesses, price is probably the dominant factor when it comes to choosing a new technology. Therefore, it’s definitely a worthwhile exercise to compare these two solutions from a cost perspective.

To do this, we need to analyse both solutions using the same standards with a common sizing so that we can compare them fairly. 

Round 1: 5 users + VM [4vCPU – 8GB RAM]

Based on the information available on the Jotelulu and Microsoft Azure websites, we can put together a comparison for the same server sizing:

• The same server [4vCPU – 8GB RAM].
• The same storage capacity [70GB SSD].
• The same number of licences/CALs [5 simultaneous users].
• We estimated a data transfer of 100GB for MS Azure since the data transfer on Jotelulu is included.

Round 1. Price Comparison between Jotelulu Remote Desktop and Azure RDS

The results show a substantial difference. For the same server sizing [4vCPU – 8GB RAM | 70GB SSD | 5 simultaneous users], the price of Remote Desktop is 70% less expensive than the Azure RDS.

Round 2: 12 users + VM [4vCPU – 16GB RAM].

You could be forgiven for thinking that maybe we had just deliberately chosen a server size that produced a really big difference in price. So, let’s repeat the exercise for a different server configuration for a somewhat more powerful environment:

• Virtual server [4vCPU – 16GB RAM].
• Storage [70GB SSD].
• 12 licences/CALs [12 simultaneous users].
• Data transfer kept at 100GB.

Round 2. Price Comparison between Jotelulu Remote Desktop and Azure RDS

Now there can be no room for any doubt. The Jotelulu Remote Desktop is still up to 3 times less expensive than the MS Azure Remote Destop Service (RDS) for both server sizes. Not only that, as the server increases in size, the difference gets bigger too, growing from 70% less expensive to 73%.

Remote desktop, less expensive: Price – the real reason that SMEs are not interested in the cloud.

Currently, only 20% of SMEs subscribe to cloud services, and the main reason for this is the cost. Small and micro businesses simply can’t afford to pay the prices offered by Azure, Google or Amazon. 

Here at Jotelulu, we understand this very well, and we want to help SMEs digitalise. To do this, we need to offer a much lower price than other competitors. This is the main reason why we strive to continuously evolve and optimise our business model.

Our objective: to get rid of the notion that the cloud is only suitable for «some» companies.

We will continue to work hard to make these services more accessible for SMEs.